Some interesting stuff here, including links to more studies showing similar results in different countries.
The summary is that the reason motorists break more laws is that speeding is so common.
I don’t think this is because motorists are all evil and cyclists are all saints. Probably, the reason motorists break speed limits is that it can be relatively difficult to keep cars below the speed limit. It’s all too easy to absentmindedly speed up. It’s also, perhaps becuase of this, widely seen as socially acceptable to break the speed limit (speaking anecdotally).
One interesting thing here, which may not surprise regular readers of Fuck Cars, is that better cycling infrastructure leads to less lawbreaking by cyclists. As is often the case, it’s the design of roads and cities that changes behaviour, not abstract appeals to road users to be sensible!
So, it appears that when giving everyone equal infrastructure, motorists are still awful at getting around.
The reason Dutch cyclists don’t break laws is that there’s little reason to. Their traffic signals work for cyclists, their paths work for cyclists, there’s no reason to speed, etc.
Compare that to most cities in North America, and “breaking the law” for a cyclist means not wanting to wait 10 minutes at the same red light because there aren’t any cars to trigger a change to green. Or riding on sidewalks because nobody feels safe on roads with semi-trucks and pickup trucks refusing to give them any space.
When motorists break the law, it’s because they are impatient or just don’t know how to drive. When cyclists do it, it’s to either be safe or because the infrastructure is so poor that it makes normal cycling behaviour seem like a crime.
There’s also a level of absurdity to cycling laws. E.g., in the UK if I:
- Approach a red light
- Dismount
- Wheel my bike just over the stop line
- Remount and cycle away
That’s legal. But! If I:
- Approach a red light
- Cycle very slowly over the stop line
- Remount and cycle away
That’s a crime.
The ‘Stop on red’ rule was obviously designed for cars and then slapped onto bicycles, a category of vehicle for which it makes very little sense.
The ‘Stop on red’ rule was obviously designed for cars and then slapped onto bicycles, a category of vehicle for which it makes very little sense.
Proof: intersections of multi-use paths don’t have stop signs and don’t need them.
intersections of multi-use paths don’t have stop signs and don’t need them.
We have a few municipalities around here that are adding stop lights for cyclists where multiuse paths meet intersections (to control the cross rides).
It’s more of a safety thing, but I’ve almost been run over several times while crossing them on a WALK/BIKE green, since motorists really don’t care at all.
You will often get a motorist committing to a left turn going into the cross ride, and since they didn’t look first and didn’t give themselves any time before the oncoming traffic arrives, they’ll plow through the cross ride/cross-walk. To say that I see this happening all the time is not an exaggeration.
A place where two multi-use paths cross is entirely different from a place where a multi-use path crosses a street. The signal for the latter is still because of the cars, not the bikes, even if it’s directing the latter.
A place where two multi-use paths cross
That’s a really rare sight to see in my region. I wish we had enough multi-use paths to actually have them cross! LOL
As a UK cyclist I can see that stopping at a red light definitely does make sense. I don’t want to hit pedestrians and other road users who have been given a green light to cross my path.
You’re no more dangerous cycling at 3kph than you are wheeling your bike at 3kph, but one of those things is illegal if you do it over a stop line, regardless of anything else you do once you’re over the stop line. That’s the absurdity.
Yeah, I say make them both illegal so the rules are more predictable and easy to understand.
Also, make it illegal to be outside. Too much mad shit going on out there.
The difference is that one will force you to actually stop, if even for just a moment. That can give you enough time to actually see oncoming traffic.
I don’t get this. You slow down if you don’t want to hit people. You also have a set of eyes. Are people not able to go “person walking in front, let’s slow down and go behind them”. If it’s a wall of people, then of course you stop.
So then the pedestrians trying to cross the road have to judge whether the cyclist is going to stop, rather than assuming they will. Why not make the same rules apply to everyone on the road to be more predictable?
Good point. Can’t win them all. If life was perfect then a simple communication could be used if need be. If only people didn’t wanna hit other people all the time or something.
The solution is to design roads where these conflicts and confusions don’t happen. For example, you can have a lighted pedestrian crossing for car lanes adjacent to a raised, unlighted crossing for the cycle lane.
The study in the article is from Denmark though. They never mentioned Dutch cyclists.
Fair point. I don’t think it matters in this context.
The Dutch and Danes both have excellent cycling infrastructure, so it doesn’t matter what place we’re talking about, since the behaviour of cyclists (and motorists) is the same when given appropriate infrastructure.
it can be relatively difficult to keep your car under the speed limit
Hard disagree. This is like saying it’s difficult to stay off you phone while driving — it’s just a shitty habit that can be corrected.
It is in america. Roads are too wide and straight, which sends subtle signals that its safe to go faster than the speed limit.
This is especially bad on roads that have had their speed limit reduced without changing anything else.
I blame American road designers for speeding more, because we should be designing roads that reflect the speed we want them to drive.
Though the best solution to speeding is just removing cars, but I doubt that will happen.
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https://youtu.be/bglWCuCMSWc?si=8786kjY70qqai4V2
Yes, drivers absolutely should be actively driving, but they don’t. I’ve watched how a lot of people drive over the years, and the vast majority of drivers aren’t actively checking their mirrors, and gauges every few seconds. Road designers have decades of data on how to subconsciously make us slow down. It won’t stop all speeding, but it will drastically reduce it in the US.
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Perhaps. In fairness, I drive very little and haven’t done so for years, so I’m probably not the best witness!
@frankPodmore@slrpnk.net One interesting thing here is that it seems that cyclists, whether breaking the law or sticking to it, are often doing so out of self-preservation. If you’re turning left at a busy junction with a bike lane, jumping the red might actually be safer than waiting for it to change. A good example of a perverse incentive!
Granted it’s not all the time, but I do agree that a lot of the time, the rule breaking is incentivized by cars’ problematic driving and not sharing the road well. If cars were on a whole more friendly with cyclists and knew the proper rules as well, it probably wouldn’t happen as often.
@pjhenry1216 I think the key thing is better cycling infrastructure. Most people would do almost anything to avoid hitting someone with their car, but it still happens all too often because of poorly designed roads
That would cause the biggest impact, but in the meantime I wish car drivers were just better educated about the rules of the road when a bicycle is present. I’m not even sure which is the easier goal honestly. Maybe better infrastructure is easier even if more expensive. Easier to change a road than it is to change people.
Granted it’s not all the time, but I do agree that a lot of the time, the rule breaking is incentivized by cars’ problematic driving and not sharing the road well.
I suspect it literally is all the time. If there were no cars, there would be no need for the rules in the first place.
If there were no cars, there’d be a hell of a lot more bikes. I’d still want rules. Like which side of the road one should be riding their bike, etc.
Before cars, there were a hell of a lot more bikes (and pedestrians, horses, and horse-drawn carriages) and yet we didn’t need rules.
Stop signs and traffic lights were invented specifically because cars were uniquely dangerous. (Or rather, they were invented to shift the blame for the danger from the cars to the infrastructure.)
There were a hell of a lot less people then too, plus a lot less traveling.
You still need laws for bicycles regardless of the presence of cars.
(Yes, this is me replying to this post on Mastodon. Didn’t realise that it would show up like this!)
Interesting!
Chuckle.
we’ve got a new cycle lane with dedicated lights near me - though only activated by a beg-button.
except you can press the button sall you want ant it’ll stay on red all the time.unfortunately due to the concrete separator i can’t nip over into the main lane and use that lane on green.
so i just have to run the red. almost every bike trip i make is lawbreaking for me.I break laws cycling almost daily. While infrastructure is fairly good in my country, there still are a lot of dangerous points. Breaking the law is necessary to get to your destination safely.
Is that a dare?
I broke the speed limit on my bicycle once. For literally seconds before the speed limit was increased in the next road section XD
I’ve broken it a few times in my younger years when I could flex hard on my fixie in steep gearing.
I stopped trying after a motorist pulled out from a side street in front of me and I slammed into the side of his car at 60+kph. Completely destroyed the custom forks I had commissioned for the bike so I could run a disc brake specifically to avoid that happening :(
It’s nice to hear your exquisite taste in bikes. Sorry it went that way.
🙄 fuck cars!
Eh, I use it as a learning experience to try be a better driver. Because I agree with the premise of this sub :)
Hah, speeding for one.
I wonder which motor vehicle breaks more rules, motorcycles or buses. Far and away those are the two vehicles I always assume will ignore traffic rules and I am seldom proved wrong, but I wonder which of the two is best-in-show.
Buses are actually the safest form of road transport. Granted, I’ve had a couple of bus drivers nearly hit me on my bike, but that’s not representative!
For sure! When a bus violates traffic rules, everyone else gets out of the damn way because it’s a bus. You don’t want to try driving aggressively against one of those. When a bus decides to be in 2 lanes at once without using a turn signal, you just do your best not to be near it.
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Buses are actually the safest form of road transport.
Yeah, but not because they are inherently safe, but because they are often driving much slower than regular traffic and in stop and go situations, often in places built around bus infrastructure.
Put them on high-speed roads or outside that tailored infrastructure, and you end up with multi-casualty crashes. Like this, or this, or this, or this.
But to the comment you were replying to, many of the bus drivers around here drive as though they were in a pickup truck. Poorly!
Oh noes. Speeding.
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Do you… know what a percentage is? Or a proportion?
I wonder how true this is in NYC as when I lived there the folks riding CitiBikes (bikes for Citi bank customers) nobody had helmets and many did not know or follow the rules of the roads.
Citibikes are just bike share bikes that anyone can use.
I doubt it’s any different anywhere else.
I don’t know about local laws regarding bike helmets in NYC, but the reason they’re not mandatory in most places is that they don’t save lives. In fact, wearing a helmet in a car is statistically more likely to prevent you from getting a head injury than it is on a bike. Most cycling fatalities and serious injuries are a result of being crushed, not hit in the head, whereas, in the UK, anyway, most head injuries happen inside cars.
Death isn’t the only problem that helmets prevent. The fact that head injuries happen more often in cars is not a logically sound reason to not wear one on a bicycle.
@gowan @frankPodmore Why aren’t helmets mandatory in cars? If it saves just one life surely it would be worth it?
Bikes dont have airbags, restraints, or a large cage of structural metal surrounding them. If you are on a bike, your only protection is what you are wearing. With that in mind, wouldn’t you want to wear something to protect yourself when moving at higher speeds? Even a speed of 10mph can be fatal if you fall off and hit your head on the ground. You cannot fall off or out of a car if you are properly wearing your seatbelt, and the airbags and structure of the vehicle are your immediate protections.
Basically, helmets in cars aren’t mandatory and don’t make sense to make mandatory, because there are already safety precautions in cars. Bikes, whether manual or motorized, do not offer these or any protections.
But the safety precautions in cars are clearly inadequte, because many people still die. We didn’t look at cars and say, ‘No need for airbags, we already have a safety precaution in the form of seatbelts’.
Please tell me what exactly a helmet in a car will do for you, unless you are travelling well over 200 miles per hour? Seatbelts already hold the torso in place, preventing one from slamming their head into the steering wheel, dashboard, or windshield, and the airbags already absorb the energy and arrest the unrestrained body parts, such as the head.
You would have to be travelling fast enough to outpace the airbags, which typically deploy at around 200 miles per hour. You wanna know why professional race car drivers wear helmets? Because they don’t have airbags.
Because all those safety features don’t prevent cars from being the place you’re most likely to get a traumatic brain injury.
It’s quite illustrative how furious you are about this. If you read what I’m saying properly, you’d see that I don’t think people in cars should wear helmets. My point is that the arguments for doing so are just as good as they are for cyclists, i.e., not at all.
Because we don’t have a massive amount of data showing they would prevent injury vs being the cause of other injuries.
@gowan Really? Or has it just been misinterpreted?
Try finding a bunch of data on people driving with helmets on who are not racing the car.
The data isn’t there because no one has been gathering it.
I once read an article about a kid who was killed by falling masonry while sitting on a bench. Clearly, we should require bench-sitters to wear helmets in case of falling masonry!
@frankPodmore That rather depends on whether your objective is to deter beach sitting or not. Of course, if the real objective is to protect life and health, the place to start is removing the source of harm 😉
You’re right! Time to ban masonry!
But it is a logically sound reason to ask, if they’re required for cyclists, why not in cars?
And hey, why stop at transportation? I’m sure wearing a bike helmet makes it less likely that I’ll suffer a serious head injury if I fall down the stairs at home, so I’d better start wearing one inside, too. It’s the socially responsible thing to do.
@frankPodmore @gowan
“Promoting the use of bicycle helmets runs counter to … policies that are aimed at the primary prevention of crashes (as opposed to secondary prevention [of injuries])”
“Attempts to promote bicycle helmets should not have the negative effect of incorrectly linking cycling and danger.”
https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/eu-road-safety-policy/priorities/safe-road-use/cyclists/pros-and-cons-regarding-bicycle-helmet-legislation_en@frankPodmore @gowan I guess the idea is that if you mandate helmets it will reduce bicycle use (which may be part of the reason you’ll seeess deaths). Less cyclists in an area raises the risks for those cyclists that remain. Drivers feel more comfortable with helmeted cyclists, and studies show they drive closer to those cyclists that wear helmets compared with those that don’t (see ‘risk compensation’)
I wear a helmet cycling kids to school fwiw.Try reading your own source next time as they continually talk about how helmets work to reduce harm. The problem with this specific case was the promotion of helmet wearing decreased the number of people riding bikes.
Your source in no way counters the idea that helmets are a good safety precaution for cyclists.
It seems rather obvious. Bicycle laws are less strict, so it’s “harder” to break them.
edit: what a bunch of dumb ass replies. no I won’t respond to any of them
Cyclists adhere to the same rules of the road.
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You’re mentioning extra laws that still need to be followed. They just replaced other vehicular laws. They’re still able to be broken.
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They’re a fairly small subset and still very easy to break though. All of those laws you mentioned would be broken if someone absent mindedly wasn’t paying attention.
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Regardless, that’s not the same as saying they’re not as strict which is what I was replying to.
Idaho stop is broken the same way a car not following a yield sign is broken. It’s still really easy and one of the most common complaint about cyclists to begin with.
In my experience, there are plenty of cyclists out there (and I’m sure it’s not the majority, but enough for me to notice) who are “traffic” when it suits them, and also “pedestrians” when it suits them.
Mostly, bike messengers in Boston are dicks. 😅
That’s just describing the cyclists who break rules though. It doesn’t mean they are required to follow fewer laws.
Hmm, I don’t know about that. Cycling over a pavement or through a red light is much easier on a bike than in a car!
edit: what a bunch of dumb ass replies. no I won’t respond to any of them
You seem lovely.
I personally love a bit of wanton furious cycling!
Explain how bicycle laws are less strict in Denmark, please?
And far, far, fewer of them
